1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for helping user form a structured diagram from unstructured information source, wherein at least one artifact is formed in the structured diagram to represent at least one information element included in the unstructured information source, the information element being the objects or the interactive relations among the objects, involved in the unstructured information source.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Nowadays, visualization plays a critical role in a process for concisely and precisely describing a system. Usually, when people want to design a new system, they may start with collecting necessary information and knowledge in the form of text, audio or video. After finishing this phase, they need to set up the architecture of the system in a form of diagrams, such as modeling, sitemap, blueprint etc, as the basis for further development work, in which the essence of this system is most clearly displayed. This procedure is of particular importance to those large and complex systems. It is an important issue of system design to help people develop formal, structured diagrams from informal, unstructured information.
Taking IT architecture design as an example, there are already several formally defined diagrams to describe different aspects of a to-be-built IT system. In the case of using UML (Unified Modeling Language), there are class, object, use case, sequence, collaboration, state chart, activity component, and deployment diagram etc. A system architect develops these diagrams based on customer requirements which are normally present in text form (interview record, files provided by customer etc). There are already some tooling software to facilitate architects to generate these diagrams now. AWB (Architect's Workbench) is an example of such tooling software which is currently available. By reading and analyzing the text description in the AWB environment, the software helps an architect identify various artifacts like actor, use case etc. and build linkages between artifacts in the diagrams and their counterparts in the text files.
However, in an AWB practice, it is tedious and time consuming to read every word in the document, and then to go through the manual process to create various artifacts. It is a hard work especially for large and complex systems, since there might be hundreds or thousands pages of text for the architects to read.
Therefore, what is needed is a method and apparatus for more efficiently helping a user form a structured diagram conveniently and quickly from unstructured information source.